...AND CHEAPER...:

That peculiar piece of meat -- likely to be the first of its kind ever sold in the US -- comes from a radical sort of food technology now in development, in which meat is produced by culturing muscle cells in vast tanks of nutrients. A similar effort -- to culture mammary cells -- is also underway and may soon yield real milk without cows. [...]

Conceptually, cellular agriculture is straightforward. Technicians take a small tissue sample from a chicken, cow or other animal. From that, they isolate individual cells that go into a bioreactor -- basically a big vat of nutrient solution -- where the cells multiply manyfold and, eventually, mature into muscle, fat or connective tissue that can be harvested for people to eat.

Products in which these cells are jumbled together, as in ground meat, are easiest to make, and that's what most cellular meat companies are developing, at least initially. But Upside has a more ambitious goal: to create chicken with whole muscle fibers. "We've figured out ways to produce that textural experience," says Eric Schulze, Upside's vice president of product and regulation. He declines to explain exactly how they do it.

Cellular meat is cultivated in tanks at Upside Foods, a company now developing products for commercial use. Cultivation facilities such as this use large amounts of electricity, so their environmental impact depends greatly on whether they draw electricity from sustainable sources.

The process takes two to three weeks from start to finish, regardless of whether they are making chicken or beef. That's much faster than the eight to 10 weeks required to raise a fryer chicken, or the 18 to 36 months needed for a cow. "We're doing a cow's worth of meat in 21 days or less," says Schulze.

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